Continuing on our fairy tale theme from a couple weeks back today we are going to paint a castle fit for a Doodlebug prince or princess!

So we reviewed the general shape of a castle and talked about the different parts. The moat commonly found at the front, the great big door that could block invaders and of course the basic design with all it's high walls and towers! I called their attention to the shape of the windows and the brick design on the roof tops and we discussed how these were used for brave knights to position themselves against to shoot arrows on approaching invaders.

Then they got down to drawing their castles and each child put in their own details! They were painted using watercolours.

​Castles are a favourite for both boys and girls for different reasons of course... but their universal appeal make them a great subject for the art room! Lots of line drawing and discussion of scale goes into setting the stage for this piece of artwork and of course we had to make sure everyone knew the basic parts of the castle as well!

I gave the Picassos lots of ideas for how the doors and windows etc. should look and had them think about what building materials would typically be used so their drawings would come out looking like the real thing.

They were drawn in pencil and sharpies. Since these drawings are so detailed we needed a whole class just for drawing, but they'll get painted in the next class! Here's the work in progress though :)

We started off the term mixing tints and shades and since this is such an important part of the art curriculum I thought I would reiterate it with this cool little jellyfish project!

We drew 5 concentric circles on our page and the Picassos were told to start off mixing the first tint and use it to paint the smallest circle. The circles were painted in oder of increasing intensity from the lightest value to the darkest to give the impression of looking up into the sunlight from the bottom of the ocean.

Next the jellyfish were drawn in using different coloured chalk pastels and smudged to create more depth and value as well. The bottom of the ocean complete with plant life etc were also added.

This afternoon I got the Doodlebugs busy painting some gorgeous flowers. Each child had to paint three and then they put them together in a cute little collage to represent a blossoming window box!

The window boxes were pre-cut but the children got to personalize them with patterns and then had to paint the blue construction paper to look like a window. Next they stuck everything in place and voila!

This is a simplified drawing of a bird but the point of this lesson is to get the children to focus on aspects of composition as well as how to draw different objects that might overlap in a picture without getting confused about what to draw first.

This is a skill that is easily overlooked or taken for granted but it is important to get a grasp of this before moving on to more complex compositions.

To emphasize this we drew these three birds in pencil first ignoring all areas where they overlapped... I told them to draw right over the other bird... then using the black sharpie they traced only the lines they wanted to keep or only the parts of the bird that would really show if we were looking at the from the front.

As part of the CAC for SEA children are required to learn the difference between a tint and a shade and have some experience in creating them. This sounds kinda serious... and it is, but that doesn't mean it can't also be fun!

For this project the Picassos were told they were going to design a store window for an ice cream shop. This ice cream shop sold only one flavour of ice cream which would be the pure colour in the middle and we would create tints of this colour by adding drops of white and shades by adding drops of black. In our painting tints are below the pure hue and shades are above.

They also had to name their ice cream parlour and put the name in the painting like a sign! As predicted there was a lot of fuss over the name chosen... lol. Take a look at their creations!

And my Thursday afternoon Picassos took their turn at mixing tints and shades... see how they did!